


in your warmth (i forget how cold it can be)

by Schistosity



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: 5+1 Things, Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Azure Moon/Verdant Wind Crossover, Blood, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd Needs a Hug, M/M, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Stargazing, and gets them!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:47:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23521042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schistosity/pseuds/Schistosity
Summary: Faerghus is cold and Dimitri is prepared.Or, the five times Dimitri keeps someone warm and the one time someone returns the favour.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 64
Kudos: 457





	in your warmth (i forget how cold it can be)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Panwithoutaplan (Yikesberg)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yikesberg/gifts).



> I've come out of my gen queen cave to write Dimiclaude for my homegirl because I love her and they're soft. This started as a facebook discussion of how many of Dimitri's very small peers he could fit under his pimp coat and turned into me writing a 10k+ examination of the healing effects of giving and receiving warmth. So like. I just can't make things simple, can I?
> 
> I listened to Everything Everything’s Get To Heaven almost the entire time I wrote this. It doesn’t fit, like, the vibe of this fic?? but it’s objectively a /really/ fucking good Dimitri album and you should all listen to it.

**1.**

Dimitri walks briskly through the halls of Garreg Mach, feeling the fur of his cloak brush against his jaw in the biting breeze.

Garreg Mach is a little too far south for snow, a state aided by its location in the rain shadow of the surrounding mountains. That, of course, doesn’t mean it isn’t cold. In the winter months the cold northern winds rip through the monastery with unforgiving chill, something that gives the Blue Lions house, natives of the even more unforgiving winters of Faerghus, a leg up at this time of year.

Mostly due to the fact they _own_ fur-lined cloaks, unlike the citizens of their temperate neighbouring countries.

Dimitri pulls his cloak—a long, black thing topped with the fur of a northern wolf—tighter around his shoulders. The one his father had worn had been a deep, royal blue with the fur of a bear. Dimitri hadn’t been… comfortable… commissioning something similar, so his was much less extravagant.

That’s okay, though.

Dimitri turns the corner into the stretch of road that will take him past the stables but comes to a stop when he sees a figure standing by the gate. 

“Marianne?”

The figure turns, her loosely tied blue hair catching in the wind as she does. “Y-Your Highness!”

Marianne is standing by the stable doors, a ring of keys in her hand and a bag of feed at her feet. She’s dressed in her uniform, but has topped it with a pale, powder blue cloak that flutters in the winter wind. It doesn’t look particularly warm. There are also three children with her, who all peek out from behind her cloak when Dimitri speaks.

“Please.” Dimitri waves a hand. “Just Dimitri is fine.”

Marianne averts her eyes. “I-If you say so…”

He thinks she’s the member of the Golden Deer that most lives up to the house’s name. None of the eclectic class are particularly “deer-like”, except maybe Claude, whose relentless preening and nosing around very much reminds Dimitri of a young buck stumbling its way into trouble.

Marianne, though… she reminds Dimitri of a doe. She’s quiet, timid, and gentle. Like the mother deer who walked the trails in the forests around his home with their fawns, Marianne drifts around the monastery as if she’s trying to make as little impression on the place as possible.

“What are you all doing here?” Dimitri asks. “It’s quite cold out.”

“I’m going to tend to Dorte,” Marianne says, more confident now that the conversation can easily be turned to horses. “It’s a little warmer in the stables, so the children have offered to help me. Very kindly, too.”

She casts a small smile down at the gathered children. There are three of them, previously hovering around her ankles but now split up to watch Dimitri’s approach. He recognises them from around the monastery. He’s helped a few of them with sword practice before, he thinks.

The youngest one’s face breaks into a grin.

“Will you stay with us, Meety?” he asks.

“M-Meety?” Marianne repeats, her eyes raising to Dimitri’s in a soft question, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

Dimitri blushes. “My name is, uh, a little hard for some of them to say.”

“Oh! Do you see the prince often?” Marianne sends her question to the children, this time; kindly keeping them in the conversation. It’s a nurturing motion Dimitri wouldn’t have thought to take.

“Yeah!” One of the older children says. “He teaches us swords!”

“Will you stay?” the youngest child asks again. He has a grip on Dimitri’s cloak now, little fists balled in the warm, black wool.

“Sure,” Dimitri says. “It would be a pleasure, but only if Marianne is okay with it.”

Marianne looks away. “It’s no trouble, Dimitri, I-I really am just tending the horses.”

The children cheer and rush forward. Dimitri stumbles onto his back foot as the three of them suddenly dive under his cloak. They wrap themselves up in the heavy wool immediately, seeking shelter from a new bout of chilly wind, and Dimitri struggles to stay upright as they knock against his legs in their effort to settle.

“Cute,” Marianne says softly, and Dimitri’s not sure he was supposed to hear it.

As the children settle in under his furs, Dimitri turns his gaze back to Marianne, who is pulling her much thinner cloak around her shoulders. She shivers. Dimitri can’t stand for that.

“If you’re cold, Marianne, I’m happy to swap cloaks,” he offers. “I am quite used to the cold.”

Marianne’s eyes widen. “That’s fine, Your H—D-Dimitri,” she stammers. “I don’t wish to trouble you. Plus, the children seem to like it.”

He wants to protest that it would be no trouble at all, because it really wouldn’t, but he stops himself. From his few moments observing the way Marianne’s house members take to her—the way Hilda tugs her around in small increments, waiting for her to catch up before moving on; the way perpetually nosy Claude will draw back his questions before she draws into herself; the way Ignatz speaks to her in a tone as quiet as her own—Marianne really _is_ like a doe. She needs to be approached slowly, at her own pace. He cannot push his ideas on her; only come to a compromise.

“At least take my gloves,” he says finally, tugging them off as he speaks. Marianne goes pale.

“N-No, Dimitri, I couldn’t possibly—”

“ _Please_ , Marianne,” Dimitri says with a smile. “I insist. What kind of prince would I be if I did not look out for my friends?”

“They look warm Mari!” says one of the children, poking her head out from Dimitri’s cloak. “Take them!”

Marianne hesitates before she reaches out and takes the gloves, handling them in her slender fingers and delicately as if they were made of glass. They’re brown leather, lined with fox fur, and while they are a little too big for her, they look quite nice when she slips them on.

“Better?” Dimitri asks. Marianne rubs her hands together experimentally.

“Much,” she decides, fixing him with a small, grateful smile.

“That’s good to hear, I—Oof!”

Dimitri staggers and looks down, raising his arm to reveal the youngest child, who’s just kneed him in the shin. The kid looks up apologetically.

“Sorry. ‘M cold,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. “Can we go inside?”

There’s a light sound of laughter, and Dimitri realises it’s coming from Marianne. She has her hand over her mouth, stifling a small giggle that rings like a bell through the winter air. He’s never heard her laugh before.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go.”

**2.**

The dead are wailing. Dimitri feels their cries like an ache in his skull. Behind his eyes, where all those he’s lost wail and scream and cry, the rhythm of his hunt fades.

Gronder burns around him.

He lies prone on the hard earth, drenched in blood as much belonging to him as it belongs to others. He is about to die.

Edelgard is gone. She’s retreating back to her ivory tower. He’s beat a path to follow her, to strike her down while she runs like the coward, coward, coward she is, but in his wake, he’s left his people to fend for themselves.

 _His_ people. Is Sylvain still alive? Is Mercedes? Felix? Annette? Dedue? The situation had been bleak when the Empire had retreated. His vision had been red. Too red. Red with Edelgard and red with blood and red with iridescent anger, and in his rage he had only managed to parse vague flashes of _why_ his prey was retreating.

A wyvern’s wide wings. A bow, as curved and white as the moon. 

He hadn’t cared. He hadn’t stopped to see if his people’s wounds were healing. He’d only seen the backs of the Imperial army and seen _targets_. Targets for Areadbhar and targets for _him_.

But he is still only one man, as much as he loathes that fact, as much as he carries the burdens of more men than he can count on his heavy shoulders. He is one man, injured and slowed by his traitorous flesh and blood. He is one man, surrounded by many, with spears in his gut and more to come.

The voices pound on the walls of his skull. They scream and scream. They beat behind his eyes a punishing staccato rhythm, hymnals to his failure.

_You fool! You weak boy! You monster! You’re going to DIE HERE!_

He’s ruined everything. _Everything_. Everything, everything, everything. It’s all in pieces now and he is going to die having failed _everyone_.

 _I left them behind,_ says a voice that isn’t of the dead. It takes Dimitri far too long to realise it’s his own. _I left them all behind._

He exhales. He exhales again. He starts counting his breaths, because they’re going to be his last, and some morbid, awful part of him is curious to see how many more he can let out.

The man above him, faceless, draped in Empire reds, raises his spear.

Dimitri will not look away from his death. He will face this moment, his penance, head on. He thinks of the living he is leaving behind, in a moment of odd clarity, and mourns them.

But the moment never comes. Instead, the soldier grunts, his back arching and his arms falling to his sides, and his spear clatters to the ground like the useless trash it is. He follows shortly after, slumping under the incredible weight of the largest axe Dimitri has ever laid eyes on.

The man lands right next to Dimitri, dead eyes staring vacantly at him. It means nothing; Dimitri has seen too many of those eyes to still be affected.

But the axe. The axe _glows_. And _its_ eye—grand and red and terrible—stares right through him and stirs something in his dying bones the eyes of dead men no longer can.

 _Edelgard,_ the dead scream, beating behind his eyes, _she came back! Kill her! Kill her! KILL HER!_

But the small part of Dimitri that is still rational knows it’s not true—that Edelgard has fled and his blind lust for vengeance has separated him from the friends he had dragged all the way here. Goddess knows if they’re alive. If they’re dead, well, they’re more ghosts for him to carry.

He knows what the axe is, though he is more familiar with the name of its owner. Said owner appears, a smudge of vibrant pink in Dimitri’s bleary vision. He recognises the boot that plants itself on the dead man’s back, the chipped pink nails that grip the Relic’s handle, the deceptively taut muscles and small frame that rip the living weapon from the spine of the Empire rat—

“Your Highness!? Hey!”

Hilda sheathes Freikugel and drops to her knees in the dirt, her tights ripping on the rough stones beneath. She’s so… bright… a streak of sunset hue and strawberry in the grey expanse of destruction that stretches out from Dimitri.

_Enemy. Alliance. They fought you too._

No they didn’t. Not before he fought them first, in any case. Not before he crossed their lines in his deadly path to Edelgard and tore asunder all who were unfortunate enough to fall at his feet. The blood on his hands and in his wake, which drips and drips and drips and pools around him like a vast, hot sea, is as streaked with gold as it is red.

Dimitri doesn’t have the energy to look at Hilda, so he closes his eye instead.

“Dimitri! Hey—Holy _shit_ , that’s a lot of blood. Fuck.”

Soft, blood-slick hands flit over him nervously.

“Dimitri, please!” Hilda pleads. “Are you alright?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer. Dimitri is aware of hands and blood and moving. And then—

“Oh _good_ , you’re alive,” she says, and her voice is right in his ear.

Dimitri pries his eye open. He’s upright now, and he struggles to drag his awareness to the rest of his body, but he thinks Hilda is under him, with his arm slung over her shoulder—he thinks she’s carrying him.

“Move your legs,” she orders, and he’s too tired to be difficult about it.

Hilda half-carries, half-guides him forward, tottering along through the brush and all Dimitri can hear is the crunch of burnt underbrush and the squelch of blood underfoot.

All he can see is grey and smoke and pink hair blowing up into his face.

“Just hold on, okay?” she says, and she leads him back the way he’d come.

_She’s taking you away from the enemy! She’s going the wrong way! Edelgard marches south, boy, you must make haste!!_

Dimitri’s dead are interrupted by movement. Hilda stumbles, barely catching herself before she sends the two of them careening into the ground.

“Fuck,” she hisses. Dimitri can see a gash on her thigh, open and oozing blood.

_The weak get culled. Leave her. Turn around and chase down Edelgard yourself. Do not waste time here._

Dimitri yanks his arm away from Hilda and instantly his knees buckle. He drops to the ground and she gasps.

“What are you d—” but he’s already holding out his offering to her. A Vulnerary, fished from his inner pockets, half-smashed and leaking its contents, but enough for her leg.

“Take th—this,” he grunts.

Hilda gets onto one knee. “You could use it,” she said, pointing to the wounds in Dimitri’s stomach he cannot see.

“It wi—will not help me,” he hisses. “You are the one ca—carrying us. It is more—more important that _you_ are healed.”

Hilda hesitates, but eventually grabs the broken flask from his hands and pours it over her wound. They both watch it close, and before Dimitri can say anything he’s being pulled up by those deceptively strong arms. He’s once more slung over the Goneril woman’s shoulders, and she sets off at a quicker pace.

“You owe me,” she grunts. “You’re getting blood on my nice gloves.”

“I he—healed you,” he snarls. “I owe you _nothing_.”

Hilda flinches at his voice, which sounds as haggard and tired as he looks. But then she snorts. She laughs. It’s a simple sound of mirth that Dimitri hasn’t heard in years.

“Thanks for the heal, _Your_ Highness,” she says, hoisting him a little higher on her shoulders, “but I’ve made a business of trading favours long enough to know saving your royal ass from, like, seven guys trying to turn you into a little Kingdom Kebab isn’t even-stevens with healing my leg.”

Seven? Dimitri’s addled mind tries to remember. Were there seven men? Did _Hilda_ kill _seven_ men?

Freikugel, strapped to Hilda’s hip, drenched in deep red and running rivulets down her skirts, answers for him. The hand around his back and the hand on his chest, dripping with fresh, hot blood, tells him what she says is true.

 _Beast woman,_ say the dead. _Butcher! Who is to say she will not turn on you? Snap her neck! Kill her now!_

 _She did it all for me,_ says the voice that is Dimitri. _She followed me. She’s bringing me back._

Beautiful, not-so-delicate Hilda, who had never lifted a finger for anyone if she could help it, has torn men apart for him and he cannot fathom _why_.

He doesn’t deserve it.

So, Dimitri says nothing, he just leans against her and _shatters_. He thinks of the living who he left to join the ranks of his dead. He thinks of his broken crown, of his tattered path of blood.

“You know,” Hilda grunts, once more adjusting her hold on Dimitri to yank him higher on her shoulders, “this is a really cozy cloak. It’s fucking _huge_. You mind if I borrow it some time?”

_What?_

“I’m going to take your gruff silence as a yes,” she says, then, “I think it would look really nice on me. It’d be perfect in the winter. Smells kinda bad though.”

_I don’t—_

“Hey? You can rest, Dimitri, I promise I’m stronger than I look.”

_What is she—?_

“You’d better not tell anyone that, though,” she says, her voice lightly scolding. Dimitri is… incredulous. This attitude is so far from anything he’s come into contact with in so long he’s not sure what to do with it.

“Hi—Hilda—?”

“Don’t talk, asshole, you’re bleeding.”

“You sh—should leave—leave me…”

“Nuh-uh, no can do, buster,” she says, achingly blasé. “I’m getting your ass back to camp.”

“S—So I can be—be y—your prisoner…?” He staggers forward and feels her tighten her grip on him. “I am a mon—monster, Hilda…”

“Uh, _no_.” He can hear her eyeroll, a gesture so familiar his mind is filled for just a second with a monastery in the mountains, with sun in the trees and fires over hearths, and—

“I’m bringing you back to your friends,” she continues. “I’m not about to let Dedue pull Claude’s arms off for not at least sending people to _look_ for you.”

“Dedue wouldn’t—” Dimitri’s thoughts stutter and trip. _Hold on_. “They’re _alive_? My…”

People? Friends? Does he even deserve to call them that? He’d abandoned them on an active battlefield to chase down Edelgard, a failed venture that had almost taken his life.

“Doesn’t m—make sense,” he wheezes. “I left—left them beh—behind.”

“And _we_ found them,” Hilda says, voice soft. “Dimitri, our fight isn’t with _you_ and yours sure isn’t with _us_. I don’t know what kind of people you think we are, but we’re not the kind to attack former classmates who aren’t our enemies after the _actual_ enemies have retreated. They’ll be back at camp with Claude and the others by now. Don’t worry. They’re fine.”

Dimitri cannot find the words. He’d been ready so accept his death, penance for leaving his friends behind to die. He’d been ready for Hilda to throw him at the feet of Duke Riegan, to look into his classmate’s eyes as he answered for the crime of caring more about the dead than the living. But that isn’t the case. He’s being taken back to his people. His people who are still waiting for him.

He cannot fathom it.

“Just rest, okay?” Hilda says gently. “And, by the way, I’m serious that you should let me borrow this cloak sometime. It’s well kept considering we’re pretty sure you were living in the woods for five years. Maybe we’ll wash it first, though.”

There’s a rumbling sound, weak and rhythmic, and it takes Dimitri a moment to realise it’s _him_. He’s _laughing_. Light and a little desperate, sure, but _really_ laughing. It’s such an unused sound… it probably sounds awful.

“Cool,” Hilda says. “That’s super creepy, big guy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop talking.”

Twenty minutes later Hilda hobbles into camp, interrupting a congregation of lost and bruised souls. 

“I saw him,” she says. “I got him out.”

And she falls to her knees with Dimitri in tow, and the two of them sit with his cloak around their shoulders. She pants and wheezes, arms shaking with exertion, as Dimitri looks up, meeting the relieved faces of his people, his _friends_. The ones he left behind, yes, but the ones who stayed. They’re still here, bloody and beaten, but whole.

Mercedes moves first, dropping to her knees in the dirt before him. She brings one glowing hand to his torn gut and the other to his face, tilting it down to her level.

“Dimitri,” she says, her voice like soft chimes. 

“I’m sorry,” he breathes, in a tone his friends haven’t heard from him in years—a tone that makes them all think of a monastery in the mountains, with sun in the trees and fires over hearths.

The rest of them drift forward. A distance is closed.

And Hilda’s hand doesn’t ever leave his back. She keeps it there, keeping him steady, as the weight of everything comes crashing down. Beautiful, not-so-delicate Hilda holds the door open for Dimitri to come home.

 _She really is stronger than she looks,_ says the voice that is all his.

For just this one small moment, the dead are silent.

**3.**

Dimitri doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

“H-How are you feeling?”

“Wouldn’t _you_ like to know, boar?”

Dimitri won’t touch Felix, because he’s lived almost a decade of Felix not letting him. So, he kneels down next to him, a foot away and not daring to lean closer.

Feilx’s clothes are dark enough that the blood pouring from the wound on his side is only visible in the steady, ebbing stream of it running over his pale hands and onto the grass beneath them. Felix groans, trying and failing to bite the noise back, and knocks his head roughly against the tree they’ve propped him up on.

“Don’t do that,” Sylvain chides. He’s digging through his saddlebags, looking for any sort of healing potion that they somehow haven’t used yet. They’re separated from the rest of the squad out here in the forests of the northern Empire, which hadn’t been an especially helpful situation when they’d run into a group of bandits.

They were victorious, of course. They won, because they were Felix and Sylvain and Dimitri. But that hadn’t been enough—it was foolish of Dimitri to think their skill could carry them forever.

Felix had taken a nasty swipe from a longsword, and now they are here.

Sylvain curses and yanks the saddlebags closed. He turns to Dimitri, who raises a questioning eyebrow, and shakes his head.

“Nothing,” he says. “We’ll need a healer.”

“You can’t move me,” Felix grunts. “I won’t make it back to camp on the back of a horse.”

The statement is true and chilling, but Sylvain gives a wry smile. “That’s oddly pragmatic of you, Fe.”

Felix shot him a dirty look. “I’m stubborn, not a moron.”

“So, we bring someone here,” Dimitri reasons.

Sylvain nods and bites his lip, his horse pawing at the ground nervously. There’s hesitation in the air.

“Go,” Dimitri orders sternly, and both men shoot startled glances at him. “Sylvain. You’re faster. Find Marianne or Mercedes.”

Sylvain blanches. “But, I—Felix—”

“I will protect him,” he says, and it’s a promise as much as it is a fact he’s desperately trying to convince them of. “You’re faster. Trust me.”

The ‘ _please’_ is unspoken. Sylvain swallows, then looks to Felix, then back to Dimitri. There’s a silent conversation happening here that Dimitri is not privy to, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

“I do, Dimitri,” Sylvain says firmly.

Felix scoffs, but something in Dimitri’s icy chest thaws anyway. He didn’t deserve it—that apparent trust—but it’s being given anyway. He doesn’t deserve it at all.

Sylvain is back in the saddle in a flash and is tearing down the path. Dimitri watches him until he can see him no longer, and he doesn’t have to look at Felix to know he’s doing the same.

Felix squeezes the wound tighter. A shiver runs through the tense lines of his body.

“Are you cold, Felix?” Dimitri enquires.

“Shut it, boar,” Felix snaps.

Dimitri sighs, trying to wrest the panic starting to roil in his chest. Felix makes a point of not looking at him, and the two sit in silence. Dimitri watches, almost transfixed, as the blood threads its way through the fingers Felix has grasping his wound. It’s too fast. It’s too much.

“You have to let me help,” Dimitri says, trying to keep the pleading edge from his voice. “You’re going to die.”

Felix scoffs and the motion seems to hurt him but he tries not to let it show.

“Oh, _spare me_. I refuse to die alone here with you,” he spits. “I’ve had enough of following my brother’s example.”

Dimitri’s blood runs cold.

In an instant he’s leaning forward, into that bubble of space Felix loathes him crossing. Dimitri doesn’t care. Felix’s words have driven a spike of ice into his heart, bleeding him from within.

Dimitri digs his nails into the soft ground, feeling the earth tear under his fingers.

“Can you listen to me for _once_?!” he begs.

Felix snarls. “I’d rather die than take orders from a beast like you.”

“Well you’re _going_ to die if you don’t _listen to me_ ,” Dimitri cries, his voice raising to a pitch one might call hysterical. “I don’t care what you think of me, Felix, but I just—I can’t lose you, too!”

He doesn’t mean to raise his voice. He doesn’t mean for it to crack on Felix’s name, a testament to a grief and a fear he’s held close to his chest for ten years. He doesn’t mean to meet Felix’s wide eyes and feel angry tears in his own.

“Please,” he says, and it sounds like begging and he knows Felix will hate him for it, but he does it anyway. “Let me do this.”

Felix doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t move to stop him either. Dimitri balls up his cloak and presses it against the wound, tenderly moving Felix’s hands away. He notices that Felix is letting him touch him—notices that this is the most he’s touched Felix outside of sparring in a long time—and places his hands back on the soft, blue wool.

“Press down,” he says. It sounds a bit like an order, maybe, but Felix complies. It doesn’t take long for the blue to begin to stain, blood seeping in a slow crawl through the fibres.

To his left, Dimitri sees the spectre of Glenn drop to his knees.

They’ve all been so quiet, lately. These ghosts. These products of an addled, broken mind. They’ve been so quiet. It catches him off guard.

Glenn’s fingers, which aren’t really there, curl uselessly through Felix’s tangled hair, stroking without real touch across his grime-smeared face. Dimitri’s breath hitches at the sudden memory of a younger Felix, with long hair and a brother to tie it back for him, of a Felix who smiled.

“What’re you lo—looking at?” Felix grunts, his voice wet and strained.

Dimitri doesn’t dare look at Glenn’s face, and maybe he’s a coward for that. He stares straight ahead at Felix, with an eye blank and startled enough to draw the dying man’s attention. He should stop. He should ignore it all, but Glenn speaks to him anyway.

_Look after him._

His ghosts have always been full of demands, but this is an easy one to agree to.

Dimitri reaches forward and presses his hands over Felix’s blood-slicked ones. He presses harder, making the smaller man groan, but this is necessary. He tugs out a bit of the cloak that isn’t padding the wound and drapes it over Felix’s legs, trying to keep him warm through the crippling chill of blood-loss.

They stay like that for a while until Felix starts to fade. His eyes begin to droop, and his head begins to loll forward onto his chest, only for the movement to make him snap it up once more.

“Stay with me,” Dimitri says. It’s a pointless thing to say, because he and Felix know better than anyone that people don’t get to choose whether or not they stay.

But if anyone could, it would probably be someone as stubborn as Felix.

“Of cour—course I’m gonna fuckin’ st—stay, Mitya,” he mutters, the words coming out in struggling bursts. “I’m no—not leaving you behi—behind...”

“What did you call me?” Dimitri whispers.

Felix winces and leans his head back against the tree. “Fuck off,” is all he says in return.

Dimitri feels Felix’s hands, trapped under his own, fall slack, and sees the slump of his shoulders as tension leaves them all at once. He keeps the pressure on, though his hammering heart is throwing him into a spiral of panic.

“Felix?” He knows there won’t be an answer. There isn’t.

He leans in close, turning his ear towards Felix’s face. He tries to listen over the beating of his own frantic pulse and lets out a shaky sigh when he feels the soft brush of small breaths on his skin.

“Please hold on,” he says, and he’s almost morbidly glad Felix can’t hear the tears in his voice or see them spilling down his cheeks. “I promised.”

Felix Hugo Fraldarius does not, in fact, die on a backwoods roadside in Adrestia that day. Two minutes and fifteen seconds after he loses consciousness, Sylvain comes thundering back down the road with Mercedes clung to his side. He’s healed within minutes.

Dimitri keeps him in the cloak, wrapping him up in the plush fabric to keep him warm. They hoist him onto Sylvain’s horse. The rider holds him close, and Dimitri feels his guts twist at how small he looks, wrapped in those suffocating furs. They used to wear their father’s cloaks when they were younger—used to play pretend in the very mantles they were supposed to grow into. Dimitri wonders if he’s ever going to grow into his.

“Thank you, Dimitri,” says Sylvain, tucking Felix close to his chest. Then he’s off again, riding back to camp with Felix bundled in his arms.

Dimitri watches them until he can no longer see them. Mercedes puts a hand on his arm.

“Are you alright, Dimitri?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Dimitri says. “I think so.”

They walk back to camp together through the dappled woods and Dimitri doesn’t turn around to see whether Glenn follows.

**4.**

The walls of Garreg Mach are quiet at night, even quieter than they had been before its fall.

Dimitri walks the walls between guard stations, gazing over the sleepy market town to the fields and forest beyond. It’s quiet up here when he’s alone, in a way that makes him feel okay with letting himself be a little distant.

But he’s not alone.

“Annette?”

The redhead, who’s hunched over by one of the battlements, makes a stifled ‘ _eep_ ’ sound and whirls to face him. 

“D-Dimitri!” She gasps, “What are you doing up?”

“What are _you_ doing up?” He tries to remember what the last bell had been. Two? Three in the morning? “It’s very late.”

Annette mumbles something he can’t quite make out.

“I’m sorry?” He ventures.

She raises her head a fraction. “I said _mwaidinfrdad_ …”

Dimitri’s hands twitch anxiously. “You’re… I’m sorry Annette, you’ll have to speak up.”

“I’m waiting for Dad!” she yelps, causing one of the birds roosting on a nearby balcony to alight in fear. She claps her hands over her mouth.

 _Oh._ “Oh.”

“He’s out scouting with Claude’s retainer—you know the big one?” Dimitri does know the big one, so he nods. Annette sighs. “They said they’d be back in three or four days. Maybe five. It’s been four… I know I shouldn’t worry… but…”

There’s a moment of awkward pause wherein Annette casts her gaze away from Dimitri and back to the road. Dimitri makes a very quick decision.

He sits down next to her, conscious of how much space he takes up in comparison. He pulls his cloak around him, but then sees the tremor of her shoulders. He’s not sure if it’s cold or nervous energy, but it can’t hurt to ask.

“Would you like to share my cloak, Annette?” He asks.

Annette blanches, pulling her eyes from the road to gaze at Dimitri. He holds his cloak up, trying his best to make the action look inviting. Annette gapes for a second.

“Oh, you’ll stay with me?”

“Of course,” he says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, because it is.

“Oh, I—” Annette’s eyes flicker from the road to the cloak to Dimitri and back to the road. “Are you sure? I don’t want to be a pain.”

“You’re not a pain,” he assures. Annette smiles.

She begins to edge closer when she stops suddenly, eyebrows knitting together.

“Is that the cloak Felix bled all over?” she asks. It’s only half a joke, Dimitri thinks.

He suddenly feels a little self-conscious. He looks down at the deep blue fabric. It’s unblemished now, but it _had_ taken quite some time to get that way. “Yes, uh, but we cleaned it.”

She considers it for a moment, then shrugs and scoots the rest of the way over. Dimitri lifts his arm up to meet her.

Annette nestles right in. She’s very small, fitting right underneath Dimitri’s arm in a snug little ball. Dimitri drapes the cloak around her shoulders, letting the heavy wool fall around her tiny frame and the fur curl around her face in the comforting way it does for him. Annette smiles, but her eyes don’t ever leave the road ahead.

It’s achingly familiar.

“I used to do this,” Dimitri says softly.

“Do what?” Annette asks in a voice just as soft.

“Wait for my father to come home.”

He feels Annette’s sharp inhale, but he’s talking now, and he can’t stop. “I used to sit up in—on the western side of the palace there’s a turret with a stained-glass window of Saint Indech. You could—If you got up there, then crawled under one of the steps, you could get the window open and have this perfect view of the incoming road—the gates too.”

“And you used to crawl up there?” Annette wagers. She looks up at him now, with sparkling blue eyes and a small smile.

“I did,” Dimitri says with a nod. He smiles a little at the memory. “No one knew it was there, so I’d be able to sit and wait past my bedtime. I’d wait for the flags to crest the hill and then I’d run down to the gate to meet them.”

Annette laughs. “His Majesty was okay with you staying up late?”

“Oh, absolutely not,” Dimitri says, and he can’t stop the smile now. “But he wouldn’t get mad. He’d just pull me up onto his horse and we’d ride the rest of the way together.”

“And put you straight to bed, I’d hope,” Annette teases.

“Of course.”

They stare out at the road again. No flags crest the distant hills. No lights shine in the darkness. The forest is dark and deep on the horizon before them and the monastery is still and quiet behind them.

“You must miss him very much,” Annette says.

Dimitri closes his eye, feeling Annette’s words sink in on the gentle breeze. “Oh,” he agrees with a mirthless sort of laugh, “Every day of my life.”

Annette is quiet for a long time. So long, in fact, that if he couldn’t see her steely gaze aimed at the road ahead, Dimitri might think she had fallen asleep.

Then she speaks.

“I used to miss my dad,” she says. “I used to wait up for him… in the early days.”

She’s silent again.

“I stopped… after a while.”

Dimitri decides to let her keep talking. He just focuses on the road, on her warmth at his side, and the way her voice thrums through the contact between them like soft tremors.

“Mother was worried all the time. I used to wait every night… so I could be there when he came back. I wasn’t up, you know, on… _that_ night.”

She treads carefully around the words, the unsaid ones, and Dimitri knows it’s because of him. Annette knows what those memories did to him, the memories of an incident that tie the Blue Lions together like butcher’s twine, sharp and unforgiving. They tie her to him. They both feel its cold ache, in the same way they can feel each other’s warmth now.

“Duscur.” Dimitri says it for her. She nods.

“I wasn’t waiting for him that night,” she says. “I blamed myself a little, in those first days. I thought maybe he didn’t come home because I hadn’t been there.”

“That’s—It wasn’t your fault, Annette,” Dimitri says, he’s not particularly good at this, but he’s come to the quick decision that Annette is not a person he ever wants to see sad.

“I know, I know,” she says softly, “and I stopped waiting after a while. I came to terms with the fact I’d lost him. But then… well…”

_She’d found him again._

“Sometimes I think he’s only here for you,” she says.

Dimitri flinches, and he can’t stop himself from jostling Annette at his side as he turns to face her properly.

“A-Annette, that’s—”

“That’s not a fair thing to put on you,” she looks up at him with a smile. “That’s between me and him.”

She puts one of her very small hands on Dimitri’s arm, guiding him with surprising force back into a sitting position. She shuffles closer, stretching her arm up to his shoulder, trying to match the embrace he’s holding her in. It doesn’t really work, because she’s very small, but Dimitri appreciates the effort.

“I wait for him now,” she says, “because I don’t want it to be for real this time, you know? I don’t want him to be gone and not come back.”

“I understand,” Dimitri says, and he does. He understands that feeling more than anything.

“I know you do,” she says, and then she stands up. Dimitri’s cloak goes with her, still draped around her shoulders. She leans down and wraps her arms around his neck in a tight embrace. It’s a little awkward, and Dimitri has to lift himself up a little so she’s not in danger of falling over. But she’s warm, and his cloak cocoons the two of them like a soft, thick blanket.

“My dad came back,” she says, her voice wavering a little in his ears, “but yours didn’t, Dimitri, and I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry. You deserve better.”

Dimitri thinks she deserves better, too. He thinks she might deserve something that won’t make her wait up all night out of fear. But he doesn’t say that. He just brings his arms up to match her embrace, pulling her close.

“Thank you,” he says, and he feels her smile.

**5.**

“Want to hear a secret, Your Highness?” Claude whispers.

Dimitri looks down at the duke, who is sitting much too close to their campfire with his sash wrapped around his face like a scarf.

It’s strange to see him out here so late, especially as the blustering snow that descended during their mountain crossing into Faerghus has settled over their hastily assembled camp like a blanket. Most of the Alliance army, who aren’t used to such conditions in their country, had retreated to their tents as quickly as they could.

Not Claude though, but he’s never been normal.

“A secret?” Dimitri repeats. He’s surprised at how playful his tone manages to be despite the anxieties that have begun plaguing him tenfold since their crossing into his homeland. “From you? That’s a first.”

It’s not a no, and it makes Claude laugh. He noses a little deeper into his makeshift scarf and his eyes twinkle as he turns his face to Dimitri.

“Sit with me,” he says simply.

Dimitri feels his lips tug into a small smile. “If I sit with you, will you move back from the fire?”

Claude shakes his head, leaning even closer towards the scant warmth of the blaze. “Nope—not doing that, friend—I’m nice and cozy right here.”

“You’re about to be nice and _on fire_ ,” Dimitri says, sitting down on a log someone had dragged over earlier to act as a seat.

He doesn’t know exactly what makes him do it, but he lifts his arm, opening his cloak to the other man.

Claude’s eyes widen. Dimitri fights a blush and tries to ignore how inappropriate this is—how it’s different from offering such a comfort to Annette or Felix or another former classmate—how this is the leader of the Alliance and there are a million little pieces of political decorum rattling around in his brain drilled into him since childhood about how this is not proper and—

Claude’s eyes crinkle at the corners, and even though Dimitri can’t see his face for his makeshift scarf, he can tell he’s smiling.

He opens the cloak a little wider.

“How kind,” Claude drawls. “Do you offer your cloak to all the wayward, freezing dukes you meet or just me?”

“I’ve been promised a secret,” Dimitri says. “I am merely negotiating terms to make sure this exchange is beneficial for both parties.”

Claude raises an eyebrow. “Offering warmth in exchange for my deepest secrets? Is that fair?”

“Please,” Dimitri rolls his eye. “No secret _you’re_ willing to give away for free is going to be a deep one.”

“Very shrewd, Your Highness,” Claude says with a soft chuckle. “Politically sound, too. I think I shall have to take you up on your offer.”

“Indeed, Your Grace,” Dimitri says, matching his faux-haughty tone with a shaky one of his own. It pulls another musical peal of laughter from Claude.

He keeps his arm up as Claude scuttles over, dashing the four-foot distance between the fire and Dimitri’s side like a field mouse darting from one burrow to another. It’s charming, but as soon as he tucks himself under the awaiting arm, all amusement on Dimitri’s part is very suddenly replaced with— _oh dear he’s very cold, isn’t he?_

“Fuck,” Claude gasps. He grabs the edge of the cloak and pulls it tighter. “ _Gods_ , Dimitri, this is so warm!”

“Mmm,” Dimitri hums in agreement, a little too distracted by the weight of Claude at his side to form a word. He hadn’t noticed before, but Claude seems smaller—which just means that Dimitri is bigger, and that Claude hasn’t grown in the five years since Dimitri stopped noticing those sorts of things about people.

He’s trembling, and before Dimitri can stop himself, he’s pulling the fur closer around his companion’s face.

Claude sighs quietly, the trembling seems to slow.

“Why are you out here?” Dimitri asks. “Your countrymen seem to resent the cold.”

“My cou—” he huffs a laugh “—Well, me too, but I wanted to watch the stars.” He answers so easily, like it’s a simple thing. Claude is good at that—at making the strange into the reasonable.

Dimitri looks up at the sky above them. It’s a typical Faerghus night, with blinding stars and an ever-present chill. The clouds have cleared and the sky looms above them like a glittering ceiling. He traces the constellations idly for a moment, before turning his attention back to Claude.

“So,” he says, “what is this secret you’re so keen to give up?”

“Ah, I thought you may have forgotten.”

“Foolish,” Dimitri chides. “I have paid you in cloaks, and I do not forget debts easily, friend.”

Claude chuckles and stares out at the fire—past it—to a bank of fresh snow.

“Today was actually my first time seeing snow,” he says.

Dimitri’s eye widens. He whips his head around, staring down at the man tucked at his side with a slack jaw and an incredulous expression.

“What _are_ you talking about?” He blurts before he can stop himself.

Claude looks a little surprised at the reaction but covers it up with a smile and a snort. “Exactly what it sounds like,” he says carefully, hanging on the words like every one of them is a calculated choice. “It got chilly where I grew up sometimes, sure, but never like this. It doesn’t snow in Derdriu either; it’s too close to the coast. This is… _crazy_. I have no idea how you guys manage.”

For Dimitri, it almost feels like a call home. Uncomfortable as it can be, snow has a place in his heart, in his memories of home. It’s a part of Faerghus, and a part of him, one he wouldn’t forfeit. He knew it didn’t snow as frequently in other places but… he hadn’t really thought about it too hard before.

He guesses the slightly awed look on Claude’s face for the entire day and his awful attempts at cold-weather protection make sense in hindsight.

“I guess that explains why you’re—”

“Whining like a baby?” Claude offers.

“—Taking this much worse than the rest of the Alliance army,” Dimitri finishes.

“Of course I am,” Claude says, “I’m not—”

He stops mid-sentence, leaving a silence that snaps and cracks with the sounds of the campfire and nothing else.

When he starts speaking again, it’s more careful.

“I didn’t grow up in Fódlan,” he says and it’s casual, like most of the things he says, but there’s a tremor to his words and a gleam in his eyes that tells Dimitri what Claude is saying is not something that has been admitted lightly. “It doesn’t snow where I’m… where I’m from.”

Dimitri knows what he’s being expected to ask. _Where are you from?_ It wasn’t awfully high on Dimitri’s list of pressing questions, but he’d be lying if he were to say it isn’t something he’d wondered once or twice.

On the surface, this is Claude giving Dimitri a perfect opening to ask the question. To say it aloud rather than keep it inside. But this, like many things with the young duke, is a test.

“Well, as you can see, it snows a lot where I’m from,” Dimitri says instead, ignoring the obvious bait.

This pulls a laugh from Claude, and something else from Dimitri. Something warm and unbidden unfurls in his chest, blooming at the quiet laughter of the man at his side. He doesn’t know how to put a name to it—to this soft thing.

He looks down at Claude again, who’s fully leaning against him now. He’s staring out at the glittering blanket of snow, glowing softly in the moonlight and the embers of the fire. He looks transfixed.

“You really were serious,” Dimitri says. “You truly hadn’t seen snow before today?”

“You do know there are places in the world _without_ snow, right?” Claude says, only half teasing. The other half looks a little worried. “Right? You know that? I’d like to hear you say you know that, actually. Just to give me peace of mind.”

“I know that,” Dimitri says shortly, then adds, “Hypothetically…”

Claude laughs. “Like deserts and tropics and shit. You know what a desert is, right?”

Dimitri shoots him a glare which only makes Claude laugh more.

“Alright, sorry!”

Claude turns back to the fire, but Dimitri is still curious.

“What are your winters like, if I may ask?” His memories of winter have always been full of snow. Fond childhood recollections of playing in the palace grounds, dusted with healthy helpings of white. Snowball fights, sledding races, snowman building…

And, of course, Claude interrupts Dimitri’s fond memories by taking a hammer to his preconceptions.

“Oh. We don’t really _have_ winter—”

Dimitri splutters. “What?!”

“I hope you know this is hilarious.”

“Wait—What could you _possibly_ have instead?!”

“Where I lived we have wet and dry seasons,” Claude explains. “It’s hot and rains for about half the year, and then the other half it’s a little cooler and dry. In other places it was completely arid. No snow.”

Dimitri tries to picture it. He knots his eyebrows together and stares at the fire, trying to picture a place with two seasons, a place with a snowless winter that was warm all year round. It was very hard.

Claude chuckles. “I’m really blowing your mind here, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Remind me to tell you more sometime,” Claude chuckles. “You’re going to have to be a bit more worldly if you’re going to be the king, Your Princeliness.”

The mood sours immediately. “Mmm,” Dimitri hums, trying and failing not to let the resurfaced turmoil show on his face.

Claude is, as always, terribly perceptive. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s… it’s quite alright.” Dimitri sighs.

“Is it… Cornelia?”

“In part.”

“Liberating Fhirdiad? Healing a broken country? Toppling an Emperor and rectifying five years of terror? Looking out into the future and wondering what the fuck you’re supposed to do after the purpose that’s been driving you for so long can no longer sustain you?”

Dimitri’s eyebrows pinch. “You’re… good at this.”

“Summarising terrible situations or talking over you?”

“Both.”

Claude lets out a breathy laugh. “I hope it’s not too forward of me, Dimitri, but I really do think you’re going to make a good king.”

It’s supposed to be a compliment, but it hits Dimitri’s gut like ice. “I’m a murderer, a beast…” he closes his eye. “I’ve been consumed by myself for so long I don’t know if I’m the right person to lead so many.”

Claude snorts. “Well that’s a lie,” he says. “You’re going to be a great king. You’re compassionate and smart and politically-minded and you don’t suffer fools gladly—I’m no expert in being a king, but I’d say those are all very good places to start.” 

Dimitri becomes very interested in the ground. 

“You’re open-minded,” Claude says in a slightly smaller voice. “You want to affect real change in the world—in Duscur, and hopefully other places, too. That’s a good quality. That’s my favourite quality.”

“It just… It feels like too much,” Dimitri says, and though Claude’s words are thawing that icy feeling, the cold is still there. “I’m just one man. I’m not so sure I deserve it—if I can even do it.” 

They’re silent for a time before Claude finally speaks again, letting the crackling of the fire carry his speech. 

“Do you want to know what I did in winter back home?” He asks. “Or, dry season, but same difference…”

Dimitri looks down at him. “What?”

“I used to do this,” Claude says, nodding to the sky above. “Stargaze.”

He takes Dimitri’s silence as permission to continue.

“When I was little, I would lie on this little balcony that came off my room. It had this beautiful view over the city, right? But I’d ignore it all and just… lie down and watch the stars, and if it was windy the curtains in the windows would drift over me and I’d pretend like I was inside the clouds, looking up at the sky from inside,” Claude smiles, wistful. “I’d do it for hours.”

Dimitri is silent.

It’s… _achingly_ personal and not at all what Dimitri expected when Claude had started talking. Sure, they were close. Claude has pulled stories of Fhirdiad out of Dimitri like a court magician pulls endless ribbon from their sleeve, but it had never gone the other way. He wonders what’s changed, or if Claude has just been so aware of his inner turmoil that he’d conceded to offer him this… gift? This tiny piece of himself to tell him he wasn’t alone?

“When I was worried about things—about my future and my place in the world and the people I cared about—I would look up,” Claude says. “The stars made me feel small.”

“Do you… Do you _want_ to feel small?” Dimitri murmurs the question, as if the moment is as breakable in his hands as Claude is. “I’d say it’s not the nicest feeling.”

“Oh, I think it’s wonderful,” Claude’s smile is brighter than anything. “In the face of something _beyond_ us—something that vast? Don’t you think it makes our problems look so insignificant? Makes our dreams so manageable and achievable in comparison?”

He gestures up and, as if on cue, a single star shoots across the heavens.

“Sometimes I feel like I could look at them forever.”

Claude looks up at the sky and Dimitri looks at him. Firelight and stars are reflected in his eyes in equal measure. They shine like nothing he’s ever seen. 

Dimitri thinks of the rose window in the palace in Fhirdiad, which spilled its kaleidoscope of colours across the marble floors like a river in his memory. The soft yellows, the vibrant sunset hues, the lush greens. 

Claude’s eyes are a bit like that—like those verdant green panels of stained glass that shine in memories of a softer childhood. They seem almost illuminated from within.

“I fear I would not be able to look as long,” Dimitri says quietly, following Claude’s gaze up to the heavens above. “Once you know the skies by heart, what is there to learn?”

Claude laughs and lets his head fall onto Dimitri’s shoulder. The point of contact burns. “So much,” he says, voice soft in a way that sends a warmth through Dimitri’s chest that has nothing to do with his heavy cloak, “there’s so much to learn.”

“Mmm?” Dimitri hums, an unvoiced question.

“It’s the best thing about the stars, Dimitri,” Claude says with an audible smile in his sleep-heavy voice, and there’s neither a nickname nor a title plastered to the name. It’s a bare and genuine thing. “They look the same no matter where you are.”

Dimitri doesn’t exactly see how that’s an answer to his question, but he doesn’t press. Claude’s eyes are closed now, and his breath is coming soft and even.

He shouldn’t have this, he knows that. He shouldn’t want it and he shouldn’t encourage it. But maybe ‘ _shouldn’t_ ’ is just a word. Maybe Dimitri can let himself, just this once, have something he wants, if only for a night.

He pulls his cloak tighter, ever conscious of Claude curled at his side, at the places where their knees brush, where Claude’s arm is pressed against his ribs, where his cheek rests against his shoulder, head nestled under Dimitri’s furs.

Dimitri sits guard, watches the stars, and tries to feel small without feeling powerless.

An hour later, Dimitri is pulled from a sleep he hadn’t realised he’d fallen into by a quiet, tremorous voice.

“E-excuse me—”

There’s a weight at Dimitri’s side he can’t identify, his mind still groggy and stuttering to a start. It’s pressing up against him, soft and radiating warmth. He’s about to move to see what it is when the voice calls out again.

“Your Highness—”

Dimitri opens his eye, which immediately makes contact with a pair of wide, brown ones. A soldier stands before him. Alliance, judging by the golds, rather than blues, that adorn his armour. He’s standing a ways back by the fire, which has burned down to embers.

It’s hard to see him in the dark, but the expression on his face is clearly one of a man afraid Dimitri is about to bite his head off.

“What is it?” he asks, voice gruffer than he intended, having not shed the aches of sleep.

“We—we’re looking for Duke Riegan, Your Highness,” the soldier explains. “It appears no one can find him. We were, uh, h-hoping you might know?” His voice wavers at the end of the question, betraying a fear Dimitri has only recently come to notice in their allied troops. A wariness around him they foster despite their leader’s apparent lack of it.

Dimitri is about to answer in the negative when the weight at his side—the one he couldn’t identify through the haze of being awoken so suddenly—shifts, and it’s in that moment he remembers what, or rather _who_ , the weight belongs to.

His eye widens, as do the soldier’s, as a hand reaches out from under Dimitri’s cloak and pulls the thick fabric back like a curtain. Claude, his stained-glass eyes bleary with sleep, pokes his head out from beneath Dimitri’s furs.

“Yes?” he asks, blinking up at the soldier. “What’s the problem? Lorenz again?”

The soldier, who has gone bright red, stammers his answer. “N-no! Your Grace, uh, Lady Goneril is looking for you.”

Claude sighs. “Of course. Probably to do another favour for her.” He raises a hand to the soldier. “Thank you, you can go tell her I’m coming.”

The soldier gives a short bow and runs off, leaving Dimitri and Claude in his wake. The night turns silent once more.

“Better get moving then,” Claude says. “Right, Your Highness? Probably a good thing we didn’t stay out here all night.”

Dimitri doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look. He just stares straight ahead at the fire and thanks the Goddess that it’s probably too dark for Claude to see the rising blush on his pale face.

“Dimitri?”

His name catches him off guard, and his attention is pulled to Claude without much say on his part. He’s looking at him again, with eyes like stained glass, yes, but here in the low light they glimmer more like grass after spring thaw; soft, bright and containing a promise of warmth to come.

“Thank you,” he says with an easy smile. How does he make them look so easy? “For keeping me warm, that is. It was nice to have a little bit of a break from—” he waves a hand at their snowy surroundings “—all this. I suppose I’m just not built for it, huh?”

 _Then you’re more than welcome to share my cloak any time,_ says a voice in Dimitri’s head that is stupid and childish and hopeful. He just nods.

Claude gets to his feet, shrugging off Dimitri’s furs with visible reluctance. His teeth immediately start to chatter, and Dimitri feels a pang in his chest and an urge to pull the other man back to his side that he must quash. It’s too much.

In an instant his cloak is off and being shoved into Claude’s unexpecting grasp. He takes a step back and looks genuinely caught off guard.

“Keep it,” Dimitri says. “You need it more than I do.”

Claude says nothing and for a moment Dimitri wrestles with why that’s odd before he realises; he’s never seen the duke _speechless_ before, and he’s just rendered him that way now. Speechless, Claude looks up at Dimitri, unfurling the cloak slowly until its edges brush the snow underfoot.

Dimitri leaves first, turning around and stalking back to the Kingdom side of camp before he can make more of a fool of himself. Rumours will spread, perhaps, but they will not speak of them.

(And if he sees Claude wearing a familiar blue cloak at their strategy meeting the following day, well… he won’t speak of that either.)

**+1.**

Dimitri is standing on the balcony of his guest room at the Riegan estate, letting the breeze from the sea toss his newly trimmed hair back from his face. He looks out at the city beneath him, stretching down to the port, the sails of ships echoing the shapes of the sharp wings of the sea bird that take to the air around him.

The sun shines down from the cloudless sky, and Dimitri inhales the morning air. He can take a moment here; the King will not be needed for a little while.

“Knock, knock!”

Dimitri turns in time to see Claude, not actually knocking, step through the open doors onto the balcony. He’s dressed down, wearing his sash without his regalia, just a simple shirt and trousers. Boots for riding. Dimitri wonders why. 

“Claude,” he greets with a smile. “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Your Kingliness,” Claude chirps brightly. “I was hoping I’d find you here.”

Dimitri leans against the balcony as Claude approaches, watching the other man drift forward to his side. His arms are tucked behind his back, obviously holding something.

“What do you have?” Dimitri asks.

“Ah. You have a good eye,” Claude says, winking, and Dimitri rolls his _good eye_ at the joke.

Claude pulls the package out from behind his back.

“A gift,” he says. “For you.”

Dimitri raises an eyebrow. “What’s the occasion?”

“Uh… late coronation present?”

But that had been months ago. Dimitri smirked—a motion he was re-learning. “Try again.”

Claude grins. “Early birthday present?” He ventures.

Dimitri thinks about it. “Hmm… no.”

Laughter, clear and bright. Claude pushes the package across the balcony railing, closer to Dimitri. “A simple thank you, then.”

Dimitri can’t possibly think of what Claude would need to thank him for. If anything, it should be going the other way.

But Dimitri was raised a polite boy, so he takes the package from Claude’s hands and opens it slowly, taking his time untying the strings so as not to rip the paper.

“You can tear into it, you know,” Claude says, and Dimitri isn’t concentrated on him right now, but he can still hear his amusement. “I was kind of expecting a high-energy reveal here.”

“No, I’ll save the paper,” Dimitri mumbles, picking at a particularly tangled knot. “You can use it again that way.”

Claude lets out a breathy laugh. “That’s—okay, sure.”

Dimitri unties the last knot and carefully pulls the paper open, letting the gift slip outwards.

“Oh,” he breathes, gathering it in his hands.

It’s a cloak. A large, thick, Faerghus-style winter cloak.

He meets Claude’s eyes, his own probably brimming with visible questions.

“It’s a cloak!” Claude says, then adds, “Obviously. Because, uh, you gave me your old one in Faerghus and Cornelia sorta set it on fire? And I know you said not to bother but, I don’t know, it’d be shitty of me not to replace it… so…”

He waves at the cloak to finish his sentence.

Dimitri places a palm on the fur, which is a rich, thick brown. It’s a little coarser than the furs he’s used to in cloaks of this ilk, but—Oh—

“This isn’t fur,” he realises dumbly.

He’s not stupid. He knows it’s not fur. He used to hunt as a child—he fed himself in the wilderness for years—he knows what kind of animal it belongs to well before Claude says it.

But Claude says it anyway, and he probably knows that Dimitri knows, but it’s not the knowing that’s important here. It’s the saying.

“It’s a deer pelt.” His voice is soft. “From a Leicester stag. I hunted it myself.”

The last part wouldn’t normally be important, but it’s _everything_ to Dimitri. He carefully gathers the cloak in his hands and lifts it from the paper with great caution, as if afraid it will fall to dust.

He grips the pelt and lets the fabric unfurl. The cloak is heavy, built for winter, made of a rich wool no longer the royal blue standard of his father, but instead a deep navy. It drops to the ground, the hem pooling at Dimitri’s feet.

It’s beautiful.

“You made this?” He asks. Claude shakes his head.

“I hunted the game for it, but no, I didn’t make it,” he admits. Dimitri expects him to continue, to tell him what talented Enbarrian tailor he commissioned it from, when he surprises him by saying, “Hilda made it.”

Dimitri’s lips tug at the corners. “Hilda?”

Claude nods. “She’s a pretty good seamstress, you know. Marianne helped her pick out the fabric. You have her to thank for it being blue instead of bright pink.”

_Oh._

“And Felix and Annette helped us get the style right since none of us know anything about Faerghus cloak design.”

_Wait, Felix?_

He realises he must have said it out loud when Claude laughs.

“Well, _Annette_ helped, mostly. Felix just sort of—” he winced, as if unsure how to say it politely “—lurked? He’s an interesting guy.”

“He is,” Dimitri mumbles.

He opens the cloak wide and catches a glimpse of something in the dark tones that is very not-dark. He folds the fabric back, revealing a small fabric tassel tied into the upper hem of the cloak’s interior.

“What’s this?”

“Oh, uh, you weren’t supposed to see that yet.”

Dimitri runs his fingers over the thick fabric, which is, upon closer inspection, braided. He trails down the tassel to the golden bead threaded at the end, feeling cool metal on his fingertips. It’s made of simple, thick fabric of bright colours, detailed in its construction rather than its materials, like Fodlan garments are. Its design is a familiar sort of geometric—it reminds him of the patterns on Claude’s sash.

“It’s Almyran?” He asks, though he already knows the answer.

Claude smiles. “Yeah. I made it.”

Dimitri can feel his heart beating faster. “What does it—does it have a meaning?”

Claude reaches out and runs his fingers down the cord, flicking the little bead at the end. It makes a light ting, and Dimitri realises with a start that it’s a bell.

“It’s a little childish,” Claude admits. “It’s a good-luck charm, more or less. It’s, uh, more like it wards the wearer against evil spirits and dark thoughts.”

He presses it back into Dimitri’s palm.

“You’re not allowed to make them for yourself,” he continues softly. “You have to be given them. They’re parting gifts—to protect you in the stead of the person leaving.”

The end of his statement is like a bucket of ice water. “Leaving?” he repeats.

Claude turns his face up to look Dimitri in the eye. His green gaze shines with sadness.

“Yeah.”

“That’s… today?”

Ever since that night in Faerghus under the wide night sky, Claude had opened his doors to Dimitri. He’d let him in, and Dimitri had begun to piece together the puzzle that was Claude von Riegan from swapped stories of childhood, of sadness and hope.

It had been on the road to Enbarr when Claude had said _Almyra_ for the first time, with a steely gaze and trembling voice that expected a retaliation that Dimitri never delivered.

It had been on the trail to Shambala that they had stargazed again. Claude had taken his hand and guided it towards old and new constellations—had turned _The Saint’s Tree_ into _The Great Stallion_ , had turned _Loog’s Sword_ into _Heaven’s Ladder_ —and Dimitri remembered what he had said the first time they’d watched the stars together, that they looked the same no matter where you were, and he’d understood.

It had been the night before Dimitri’s coronation, under a startling Faerghus sky, when Claude had pulled him aside. _I have to go home,_ he’d said, _not tonight, not tomorrow… but some day soon. I wanted you to be the first to know._

“It had to be someday,” Claude admits, voice soft, as delicate as the sea breeze. “Might as well be today, right?”

Dimitri clenches his fists in the cloak, feeling the coarse deer pelt under his fingers. “ I—”

_You what? You can’t do this without him? You’re going to put that shit on him right now? You’re going to keep him from his family? Sad because he’s going back to one and you have nothing? Must you inflict your wounds on everything you touch? You—_

“Dimitri?”

Dimitri opens his eye.

“I don’t know if I can do this without you Claude,” he says. “You’ve been indispensable. I don’t know if I can…”

 _What? Handle it without him there to hold your hand? You_ child _, you’re—_

“Hey.”

There’s a hand on his shoulder. Dimitri looks up.

“We can’t choose the hands we’re dealt, Dimitri, but we can choose how we play them,” Claude assures. “You’re going to play yours right, with or without my help. I can feel it.”

Dimitri lets himself be selfish, for just a second. “What can I say to convince _you_ to show me _your_ hand?”

Claude huffs. “Not much, I’m afraid it’s… It’s uncertain, and I’m not one to count my wyverns before they hatch.” He bites his lip, looking contemplative. “I don’t want to say anything before it’s ready. I have… political ties in Almyra I might be able to use to make some big changes. Good ones. For everyone.”

Dimitri smiles weakly. “A smart man once told me wanting to affect change is one of the best qualities a person can have.”

Claude blanches before recovering. “Well I—he must have been very smart.”

“The smartest,” Dimitri says wryly, though the humour behind it is tainted. Claude frowns.

“Dimitri, listen. No matter what happens—it’ll only be for a few months,” he says. “I’ll come back in no time. I promise.” 

“I don’t—” Dimitri sighs. “It is selfish of me to demand your presence, Claude. This—Our unification efforts have kept you away from your home for too long. Don’t feel beholden to making promises for my sake.”

Claude surprises Dimitri by snorting. He leans against the balcony railing, casting his gaze over Derdriu, down to the port which bustles with ships and people alike.

“This place _is_ my home, Dimitri,” he says. “Whoever said you’re only allowed one is an idiot. I have family over there, sure, but I have a family of sorts here now, too. A big one—one I wouldn’t give up for anything.”

He turns back to Dimitri.

“I miss Almyra, but I’ll miss it here, too. I’ll miss Derdriu and the Alliance, I’ll miss my Deer and your Lions—as much as they might not miss me—I’ll miss spring and… and I think I might even be able to miss winter, if it’s a winter I’d be spending with you.”

Dimitri knows he’s blushing like nothing else, but there isn’t much he can do about it.

“So, I’ll be back,” Claude continues. “That’s a promise I’m happy to make. Even if I can’t tell you what I’m doing, just know it’s a path that’s going to bring me home.”

And though his heart is heavy, Dimitri smiles. “Then I look forward to welcoming you home again,” he says.

“Also,” Claude adds, leaning close with a conspiratorial glint in his eye. “I just think it would genuinely be a lot funnier if I surprise you with this instead of telling you.”

The tension breaks.

Dimitri rolls his eye. “The scheme is revealed, then? Stringing us all along for comedy value?” he says. “You truly are incorrigible, Claude von Riegan.”

Green eyes glitter with mirth. “Incorrigible? I’ve been called a _lot_ of things in my day, Your Majesty, but I’ve never been called _that_.”

“Then I’m honoured to be breaking new ground.”

Claude hums. “A regular pioneer.”

He reaches up and, in a motion Dimitri hadn’t quite been expecting, rests his hands over Dimitri’s, still holding the cloak.

His hands are… incredibly warm, and Dimitri is staggered for a second by their heat. He relishes in it, quietly, finding comfort in the touch even though the day isn’t that cold. They stay like that for a time.

Dimitri speaks first. “Claude, I—”

“Hey,” Claude says suddenly. “You want to hear a secret?”

Dimitri remembers a snowy night in Faerghus, remembers sharing a cloak by a crackling fire, remembers the vast stars above and a quiet promise of solidarity.

“From you?” he teases. “It must be a good one.”

Claude winks. “I only gave you half your present.”

Dimitri’s brow furrows.

“What’s the other h—”

The words die on Dimitri’s lips as Claude kisses him.

He brings his hands up—those clever hands. Those warm, warm hands—and where his touch meets Dimitri’s skin it blooms. He curls one hand around Dimitri’s, their fingers in a gentle, entwining tangle, and cups his cheek with the other. Dimitri can feel the brush of an archer’s callouses on his skin, drifting up his face to lazily brush through his hair. He thinks he could be buried right now, in this clever, warm touch.

He closes his eye. He kisses back. He feels Claude smile.

Right here, under soft, parted lips and clever hands that burn, Dimitri lets himself forget everything for just a moment.

For just a moment, Claude isn’t leaving. How could he be? He’s right here, after all, with his hands on Dimitri, with his lips on his, with his small smile and his hammering heart Dimitri can feel through their chests. 

Claude weaves his fingers fully through Dimitri’s, sending the cloak tumbling to the floor, but neither man pauses. Dimitri wraps his arm around Claude’s waist, pulling him closer as he presses forward. Claude surges up, getting onto his tiptoes to deepen the kiss, and the childish motion of it makes the two of them laugh.

The kiss deepens, just for a few moments, but they stretch to infinity as Dimitri inhales— _takes in_ Claude in his entirety. He finds the heady fragrance of pine needles on his tongue and smells the lingering scent of beeswax on the fingers that brush his cheek. Everything about him is _soft_ and _warm_ and _gentle_ and Dimitri’s heart swells under it all.

And then it’s over. Claude pulls back slowly, and Dimitri blinks his eye open like he’s walking into sunlight. In a way, he thinks, he is; Claude stares up at him with his warm eyes that glow from inside like light through leaves, and the sun that beats down on Derdriu casts a honey-glow on his skin and his shiny locks of dark hair. _Like a sun,_ Dimitri thinks, _but one I am allowed to look at._

“That—That was a good present,” Dimitri says hoarsely. Claude laughs.

“Yeah?”

“The best.”

Claude smiles at him—a smile, nothing short of blinding, that reaches his eyes—a little crooked, with lips parted and the crinkle of relatively new laugh lines at the corners of his stained-glass eyes.

“I’m glad,” he says.

Dimitri thinks that, for the first time in a long time, he is too.

**Author's Note:**

> Dimitri be like [Noel Miller voice] I WANT A 5’8 PIECE OF SHIT BOY, A 5’8 LIL MOUSEY BOY.
> 
> This winter boy Dimitri fic is dedicated to @panwithoutaplan, who let me scream at her about it for the entire weekend, but also to my friend, Midwest Ben, who apparently cried when he found out Floridians don’t get snow at Christmas. Cold boy Dimitri is for u, Ben.
> 
> Find me @fizzityuck on tumblr, or bleeding out face down in the snow. Thanks for reading!


End file.
